You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2008.
All I really have to say is in the title of this post: Happy New Year, one and all. May 2009 bring us all joy and peace, lots of good books (written and read), and great distances on the roads to our dreams.
I received some very bad news today — someone I know died unexpectedly — so I don’t have a lot to say. The one thing I do have to say is that my friend Christine Merrill’s latest Harlequin Historical is free as an e-book download today. You can get it here.
I have more books than I have time to read. I think I have more books than I will ever have time to read. Today I went to the library, returning six books, picking up four. Of the six books returned, five were unread in the time I had them out. I also sent a note to myself at home to bring three books back to the library, and on the ride home, I decided to add another book to the list. Those are unread, too, books I couldn’t read in the two months I had them out, books I won’t have time to read before they’re due without hope of renewal.
Part of my failure to read those books is mood: I wasn’t in the mood for them in the time I had them. Mood is a huge factor for me, probably the most important factor in choosing what to read (among those books that have met all my other, not always definable, criteria).
Today, amid all this, I realized that my promise to try to buy a book a week is going to get me into trouble if I’m not actually reading a book a week. If I spend the day on it, I can read a book in a day … but I don’t spend whole days reading, except on rare occasions.
Maybe I need to start doing that — spending a couple of hours one day a week just reading. Sunday afternoons are the best candidate, maybe after I come home from the gym. I can creep into bed with whatever’s on deck and just loll about suppertime.
And maybe I can start reading on the bus again. I stopped in the mornings because I couldn’t block out the rantings of the crazy driver unless I played music, and I haven’t read at night because the conversations of the other passengers distract me. The crazy driver is gone — one rant too many — so I have the mornings, and, really, if the book is good enough and what-I’m-in-the-mood-for enough, the distraction won’t last long.
The thing is, this can’t turn into yet another obligation I end up resenting and rebelling against. This has to be something I do for me, to refresh and nourish my soul, to balance a life that too easily becomes unbalanced.
I’m a reader before anything else. I need to remember that and encourage myself to do more of something I really love.
One of my Christmas presents this year was a set of Sharpie Permanent Ultra Fine markers. My plan was to use them for my mapping project. Sadly, a good handful of them were dried out, so I returned them, and got Bic Mark-It markers instead.
Either set had — from one perspective — way too many colors. From another perspective, both sets were feasts. Hopefully, all that color encourages me to play and to stop trying to organize my process before it gets going. (This is yet another instance of getting out of my own way.)
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I also got two gift certificates to Barnes & Noble, one from each of my sisters. This helps me with my plan to buy a book once a week. I have two books to buy next week, Dawnkeepers by Jessica Andersen and The Wild One by Denise Agnew, so I’m off to a good start…
Bookstore gift certificates make me feel crazy rich.
I like technology; I like flinging myself at new software and figuring it out. That’s part of the reason I’ve downloaded all that software in the last week couple of weeks.
One of the programs I downloaded was Freemind, free mind-mapping software. Fooling around with it made me realize something I’ve only been marginally aware of: software is fun, but paper and pen are key. At this point, it’s easier for me to use pen and paper as I figure out my mapping process, than use a software program.
But it goes beyond that. I do almost all my writing in longhand. Most of my blog posts — including this one — are written out longhand, then typed in. I’m to the point where I can’t write my first draft of a scene on the computer. I have to write it out longhand.
Part of what drives this is how portable paper and pen are. I keep a Moleskine Volant Large Ruled Notebook in my purse, so any time anything occurs to me, I can capture it. Even if I had a tiny netbook, it wouldn’t be as light or as convenient as my simple paper and pen.
But even beyond that, I love the physical experience of writing with pen and paper. I love feeling the point of the pen as it moves across the page (which is why matching the two is so important), and I love the sight of my handwriting (even when it’s messy, like today).
This is my favorite image in the whole wide world: the sight of the whole, small, lovely fragile Earth rising over the moon.
The picture was taken at Christmas 40 years ago, by the crew of Apollo 8, and it makes me cry every time I see it.
At the time, Frank Borman said, “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” I can wish nothing more for all of us than there should be peace and joy on our small, beautiful world.
The other day, I mentioned that I’d bought a sketchbook to play around with a characterization idea I’d had recently. I also said I’d describe it when I was less tired and more coherent. I’m wiped out because I haven’t done anything — I’m sure you know how that goes — but I’m going to describe the idea anyway.
About 10 days ago, I got a bee in my bonnet about various and assorted types of software. I fired up my copy of Liquid Story Binder, and I downloaded yWrite4 based on a review in the online version of PC Magazine. Somehow that led me to mind mapping. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things that continues to surprise me — not that it ever should have — is how behaviors and issues and hangups in my writing life are the same behaviors, issues and hangups in my non-writing life. I have learned a great deal about myself as an entire human being since becoming a serious, dedicated writer.
Most of the time, the current flows one way; I understand something about myself as a writer, then my perspective widens and I understand myself as a person. Every now and again, though, the current will reverse, and I’ll realize something in a non-writing context that will illuminate things for me in my writing life.
That happened last night. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m clearly in vacation mode, because I couldn’t remember the date. I’m also in holiday mode, in that I’m not thinking of much beyond Christmas shopping: When am I going to the mall tomorrow? What am I getting? Where can I find it?
I did a little shopping today with my sister G. She needed to go to Barnes & Noble, so of course I sacrificed myself and went with her…
Actually, the conversation went something like this…
The snow was falling like crazy, you couldn’t see more than a couple hundred feet in front of you, and you just knew it was going to get worse. Once we’d brushed the car off, and were driving away from the mall, I said, “Bookstore?”
G. said, “Do you mind?”
I said, “Oh, please.”
The blizzard would had to have been much worse to keep me from going to the bookstore. I almost bought three books, but I restrained myself, and only bought one. Oh, and a sketchbook, for playing around with a characterization idea I got recently (which I will describe later, when I’m less tired and more coherent).
The thing is, I might disappear here for a few days. It’s that time of year, and all… But I’ll be reading and writing; that’s a given.
For once, I didn’t spend my Saturday with my sister. We had dueling hair appointments — different times, different salons — and never managed to hook up. Instead, I spent the day at home, cooking. I made bread from scratch, and then I made beef stew.
I’d never made bread from scratch before — the recipe said this was a good bread for a beginner, and I guess it was, because the bread came out rather well. The stew? Not so much. I didn’t cut the potatoes and carrots small enough, so it took forever to cook.
Still, I made something from bits and pieces of this’n'that, and that to me defines creativity. So if I didn’t write today–and I didn’t–I was still creative.
